Adam Driver in “The Report”. Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
‘The Report’ is an important 21st century history lesson
Directed and written by: Scott Z. Burns
Starring: Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Linda Powell, and Ted Levine
“The Report” – Director/writer Scott Z. Burns’ film is not a political thriller.
It is a history lesson.
A thorough history lesson that chronicles the ugly, horrific events perpetrated in the shadows of the U.S. government – at the direction of some forces within the Central Intelligence Agency, to be exact – but it also rightfully champions a man who cast a light on the said injustices in the form of a landmark report.
A 6,700-page report with 38,000 footnotes.
In 2009, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee discovers chilling details about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and chairman U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) asks one of her staffers, Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver), to lead a broader investigation into the agency’s tactics and operations. Little did Sen. Feinstein and Jones realize that a long, exhaustive search into the facts would lead to the darkest corners of the human condition.
Daniel and his team made a Herculean, tireless effort over a length of time that will not be revealed in this review, but if one calculates the number of days, weeks, months, etc. it would require to compile a report with 38,000 footnotes, well, a three-day weekend won’t cut it.
Burns found superhuman strength of his own. You see, the majority of Daniel’s waking hours - over an inordinate amount of time - were spent in a nondescript, windowless, antiseptic office in an ordinary government building, and he and his team poured over mountains of documents. Not only is sifting through the aforementioned paperwork a mundane, thankless task, but the said material delves into countless departments’ and people’s actions through a maze of notes, memos, minutes, messages, and letters.
In other words, the raw narrative is inherently confusing, extensive and dry, but – remarkably - Burns translates and condenses the facts into a cohesive 1-hour 59-minute movie that is free from misunderstanding, and it holds our interest. Certainly, as an audience, we have to pay close attention, but Burns eases our burden by creating composite characters, clearly marking the bad actors and giving us enough information to comprehend the CIA’s overall downward path without overwhelming us.
Along the way, the film frequently visits the past and into Black sites, where Middle Eastern men were tortured. The trips into these retaliatory years after 9/11 have a grimy, yellowish tinge, as CIA-hired contractors James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith) attempt to extract information through extreme methods, called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). These EITs, however, are not improvements in gathering important intel, and in fact, they have the opposite effect.
These moments of brutality – that include waterboarding - are tormenting for the audience to watch. It gets very, very ugly.
During these scenes, the camera focuses more on the men delivering the torture rather than the captives receiving it, and in my Nov. 2019 interview with Burns and Jones, the director explains this choice: “It’s more about us, then it is about the people who were subjected to (torture).”
Daniel discovers villains from the past, but also adversaries in the present, who don’t necessarily want the CIA’s mistakes revealed to the public, and they possess the power of the pen - in the form of redaction - and simply power, in general.
Driver presents Daniel’s industrious drive, a diligent, singularly-focused intensity towards finding answers, but he contains his motivation within a professional decorum that allows him to open doors within Washington’s bureaucratic networks. He isn’t Jack Bauer. Daniel is a professional, who passionately asks questions, and documents his findings for 14 or 16 hours a day, while relationships, holidays and creature comforts fall out of his purview.
We, however, don’t get a whole lot of insight into Daniel’s personal life or feelings outside of his work, but Driver does convey the man’s passion for the job and the inherent pain that comes from unearthing an incalculable number of acts of violence. Actually, Daniel did count the number of times that the U.S. tortured its detainees.
One can also count the number of political players on-screen including, George Tenet (Dominic Fumusa), Sen. Mark Udall (Scott Shepherd), White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm), CIA Director John Brennan (Ted Levine), and, as mentioned earlier, Sen. Feinstein. For the record, Bening is uncanny as the California senator and seems to almost channel her, like Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” (2004). Bening is that good here.
It’s difficult to have good feelings coming out of “The Report”. The film opens old wounds that we thought were completely healed. On the other hand, it does provide relief, because Daniel J. Jones’ tenacity offers an encouraging statement for 2019 and beyond, and that makes “The Report” an important history lesson.
(3/4 stars)
Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – has penned film reviews since 2008, graduated from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and is a certified Rotten Tomatoes critic. Follow Jeff and the Phoenix Film Festival on Twitter @MitchFilmCritic and @PhoenixFilmFest, respectively.
